My mother as a young woman.
My mother was born in 1894. She attended the upper school for girls in Kassa, and she prayed fervently that she could study as well, but they [her parents] told her, 'No way, you are beautiful, you must get married.' The other two weren't ugly either, but my mother was the most beautiful. They didn't allow her to be educated. She attended the teachers' training school run by the nuns in Kassa. My mother got married to father in 1914 when she was 20 years old, and they moved to Budapest. I think the marriage was an arranged one. During the war, my father was a traveling postman : This is what they called those who came and went by train - and he settled for a long time in Marosvasarhely [today: Tirgu Mures, Romania]. I was almost born there. In the end I was born in Kassa in '18. There was war and lack of food, so my mother went home to give birth at her parents' place. Then we became a very strange family, because when my mother was 45 years old she gave birth to another child. I was already 21 years old, and my only sister was born then. When my mother became sick, my sister went to school from my place, and also, to the university for a while, until she went to study in Cuba.
My mother never wanted to teach, she didn't like it, they forced upon her the teachers' training school. She always invented something to do at home. From time to time she found something to do, she got through the examination as a tailor, then she sewed over-garments; she also had a few employees. And then she did something else. Sometime at the end of the '30s it suddenly came into vogue that when the spring came straw hats were dyed and women wore these. Mother observed that very early on, at first she crocheted it by herself, then she gave the work out to others. But by July it went out of fashion. And then the whole thing ended. About ten years later she was knitting gloves, scarf, panties and everything of mohair. At that time I was also knitting, no, I span rabbit hair on the spinning wheel.